UniPay Gateway Payment Advice

Demystifying Bank TransfersThere are three general approaches, which are commonly used to move the funds between different places (such as bank accounts).
Bank wires (often referred to as bank transfers) do not take long to clear and are, perhaps, the simplest and the most common way to move your money from one place to another. The approach is not quite what you need if you need to clear large batches of transfers at...Read more…

Optimizing Recurring Billing with BIN filesMany recurring billing businesses at the market consult BIN files to get useful information concerning transactions they process, cards they accept (or do not accept), and issuers of these cards.
Some companies turn to BIN files to filter out pre-paid and gift cards, which many customers use to pay for low-cost subscriptions and memberships. When such a pre-paid (or gift) card, used for recurring payments, is depleted, the cardholder can simply...Read more…

PA-DSS certificationPA-DSS is a universal data security standard to be followed by payment software vendor companies. Being a complex multi-phase process, PA-DSS certification might present a challenge for payment application developers. In order to go through PA-DSS certification process successfully, one needs to understand the key phases of PA-DSS audit procedure.
These phases include gap analysis, payment application installation in a PA-DSS compliant laboratory, payment application testing, analysis of documentation and diagrams,...Read more…

Credit Card BIN FilesCredit card BIN file is a useful source of information, that merchants can utilize in their processing strategies. BIN ranges of cards can tell a lot: from card issuing bank and country of issue, to card class. Beside the issuing bank, the BIN range of a card carries information about maximal primary account number length, card type (debit, credit, etc.) and its PIN capability, debit networks, which accept the card,...Read more…

Split Funding and Adaptive PaymentsThe simple residual revenue sharing mechanism envisioned a simple splitting of a merchant fee charged for transaction processing, among several parties involved in the process. These parties included the association (Visa, MasterCard), transaction processors, and, possibly, merchant services providers.
Recent developments, witnessed in the merchant services industry, call for introduction of new, more advanced remittance models. These models should allow to automatically split various fees, commissions, and surcharges between a relatively...Read more…

Peculiarities of host EMV integrationsIn view of the approaching transition to mandatory support of EMV standard by US merchants, it is important for payment gateway software developers to understand the key features they need to add to their products to be able to make perform EMV integrations as smoothly as possible. Particularly, the EMV integration-related logic must include the functionality for exchange of data between a chip card, a terminal, and a gateway/processor. EMV...Read more…

The Benefits of EMV CardsIs the choice of EMV standard a conscious choice? This is the question many merchants might ask in view of the approaching deadline for mandatory support of EMV cards (October 2015). Why should a business switch to EMV cards and terminals, if EMV technology does not guarantee ultimate protection against credit card fraud?
Originally, EMV technology was introduced to protect retail businesses. Even decades ago EMV cards (also called chip cards)...Read more…

Challenges of Transaction Data ArchivingData archiving can be a challenge with any database system. Particularly, transaction data archiving presents significant problems for many database systems in payment industry.
Companies with high transactional throughput have to store enormous data volumes, because they accumulate transactional data very fast. Transactional data has to be stored and easily accessed. Access to data must be ensured in order to make it possible to compile historical reports and get back to...Read more…

Integrating Terminal Application into a Payment Ecosystem There are two basic approaches, which a business can utilize, if it needs to integrate a terminal application into its payments ecosystem. Either it can use a standalone terminal solution, or an integrated terminal solution.
In a standalone terminal solution the POS application does not interact with the terminal application in any way when the payments are made, i.e. the terminal functions independently and interacts directly with the payment gateway.
If a...Read more…

Implementing Your Own Payment Terminal SolutionMany retail industry players are currently considering the idea of supporting payment terminals and searching for optimal payment terminal solutions. The idea of payment terminal solution implementation becomes even more relevant, because of EMV standards are to be imposed upon US businesses pretty soon. In order to support EMV, a payment gateway or a PSP needs to integrate with the respective payment terminal solution.
One of the options for a payment...Read more…

Payment Gateways and High Availability ConceptThe concepts of high availability and fault tolerance are rapidly gaining importance among companies which accept credit card payments. The concepts are especially relevant for enterprise merchants who process transaction around the world 24/7. Payment systems of such large-size merchants must always be available. On the other hand, payment gateway software and other applications have to be regularly updated, which requires some maintenance time. In this situation high availability solutions...Read more…

Three Companies that Need Open Source Payment GatewaysThe concept of open source software development is rapidly gaining popularity, especially in such industries as restaurant business, fitness center, POS etc. In recent years more and more companies started considering the option of switching from their existing payment processing platforms to open source payment gateways. Traditionally, payment gateway software was a technical commodity, and the source code was something carefully protected by a company which developed the software and...Read more…

EMV Certification in a NutshellEMV is a worldwide card transaction authentication standard every merchant services industry player must be at least familiar with. The issue of EMV certification is of special importance to payment gateways and owners of proprietary payment ecosystems. Small-size merchants who want to process EMV transactions can just purchase the necessary hardware and software from some third-party entities (providers), so they do not need to conduct the deep analysis of the...Read more…

Payment Card Transaction Decline CodesRecently some new rules have been introduced by card associations into transaction processing industry. As a result, card associations charge additional fees for repeated submission of declined transactions with some specific decline codes.
On the most general level, card transaction declines can be classified as hard or soft ones. A soft decline signifies that if the declined transaction is reattempted at a later time, it can be approved, possibly after some...Read more…

Offline processingStore-and-forward mechanism implemented for offline transaction processing is and important solution allowing a merchant to process transactions in the cases when this merchant experiences connectivity problems with the processor’s application.
Store-and-forward mechanism originates from the times when modems were introduced into credit card processing scheme and connectivity problems happened rather frequently.
The mechanism works as follows. If connectivity with the processor’s application is broken (usually, due to some errors), transactions are stored...Read more…